The Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education

The Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE) is a multidonor collaborative that works in eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. The collaborative aims to improve secondary education access, quality, and relevance, and to increase the visibility of key challenges and solutions in secondary education. To achieve these goals, PSIPSE supports the development and testing of innovative secondary education models that directly target youth through academic, employment, and other support; build teacher capacity; strengthen school leadership and management; and engage parents and community members. PSIPSE also supports efforts to facilitate the scale-up of effective interventions through systemic reform, as well as research projects that can help expand the evidence base on secondary education.

Since the creation of PSIPSE in 2012, Mathematica has served as its thought leadership and evaluation partner. In this role, we first refined the collaborative’s theory of change and offered recommendations to strengthen and institutionalize its approach to fostering change in secondary education. Mathematica also conducted a literature review, portfolio analysis, and assessment of the educational context in all eight target countries. Based on this work, we developed a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework that included a monitoring system, studies to measure impact and identify cross-cutting learning, and strategies for fostering dissemination and scale-up.

Mathematica recently began a new phase of work as PSIPSE’s learning partner. We are supporting the collaborative in implementing the monitoring framework and preparing briefs and presentations to share PSIPSE’s vision, approach, and MEL framework with internal and external stakeholders.